Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Explanation of Terms

Some of the terms used by techs and myself:

Dead:Means No Power, No Lights, No Charge Light.Check DC Jack, test with known good battery

No Power/No Lights:The unit will work from charged battery, but not from AC. Some light may be on.Check DC Jack.When you move the charge plug with battery installed, the charge light may come on intermittently. This is caused by a cold solder joint on the DC Jack, or bad contact inside the jack.

No Power/With Lights:If you hold the plug at an angle, the unit will come on, but letting go of plug it shuts down.Check DC Jack

Will Not Charge Battery:Unit runs when plugged in, but will not charge battery. Or the battery only last 15min after charging all day.Check Adapter - Generic or Wrong AmperageExample -If you are using a 65w charger and trying to charge a DV9000 the battery will never fill up to it's maximum.Volts x Amps = Watts 18.5v x 3.47a = 64w and 18.5v x 4.47a = 90w

Blue Screen of Death [BSOD]Very common issue with hardware changes or failure, wrong drivers Start laptop, continue to press F8 until you get a Start Up MenuDisable Auto Restart Restart in Safe Mode - Disable all items in Startup until you take to shop Or uncheck all unknown/unverified softwareYou can also remove or disable unused items in System Hardware, modem, network cards and reboot until culprit is found.Those are just some of the symptoms that you may read on this site.

13 comments:

Re. No Power/With Lights - Also check with a different adapter. On some adapter plugs, the contacts spread and stay slightly apart, so good contact is made only if you push the plug to one side or the other.

I got tired of always looking for the various adapters, so I made a 6 adapter pigtail. Dell, IBM, Sony, HP90w, Toshiba, Gateway. And it is a 6.3a Toshiba charger, so I have enough current to charge the biggest ones (except the 120w Dell Insp. 5150/1150) so that covers 90% without having a row of brick/chargers under my workstation.

AC adapter & laptop DC jack are good but no turn on from either ac or battery. battery light does go on & indicate charging - eventually goes from orange to green w/ ac in. (acer 4530). 5v & 3v standby appear good. acset & acprn on isl6251 appear good so it seems to recognize that the ac is plugged in, but wpce775 EC which receives acprn doesn't appear to want to allow power on. cmos battery 3.3V. other than that nothing. reset procedures no effect. only telltale sign is if power button is held down - first - while then plugging in ac then a faint tick tick tick sound is heard - haven't located it yet. still proceeding with tests but all hunches are appreciated or perhaps someone has seen this before. some people refer to this problem as the "acer sudden death syndrome". just happened out of nowhere. unit is 2.5 years old. thanx.

Since you have not given me an indication on what the symptoms were I cannot even guess what is wrong with the motherboards. In the DV1000, V2000, M2000 there are minor changes such as the SD Card reader/PC Card slot or Remote control.

You may be reading the meter in the wrong mode. My first suggestion is understand how your meter works. As previously stated, this is an advanced blog for skilled techs as it is impossible to instruct via a blog.

Note:It is virtually impossible to get 512v or 109v from a 19v source (AC adapter). You should be in the OHMS (Ω) mode. Perhaps the values are in Ohms [512Ω and 109Ω] and you misread your meter. Either way you should only have a value in one direction. And the orientation of the MOSFET Pin one is in it's correct location.

Otherwise - they usually have shorted caps on the backside- near the DVD connector

==========================================================================Due to international keyboards and character mapping the Ohm/Omega symbol may appear as something else outside the U.S.

i am sorry you are right i guess i am not explaining my self very well, i am testing the mosfet on diode mode ->+ and the motherboard is dead no lights no nothing. Once again i want to thank you for your response and i guess it will be hard to explain my situation here but anyway thank you.

No Problems:First check to see if you have + voltage at the back of the DC Jack then follow the POS line. If the voltage drops off to 3v or less, you have a shorted cap somewhere. If the battery charge light comes on - you have an open MOSFETIf you have pulsing light on charger (or models with ring lights) it is a cap that is beginning to fail.

Finally!!! i got the first motherboard to work it had two capacitors shorted and one mosfet(AO4413)and replaced the mentioned mosfet with the AO4407 from one old motherboard same with the capacitors, i am still confused in how to test those ceramic capacitors but i will get more experience fixing more laptops i really appreciate your blog and the time you took to help me on this project keep up the good work and once again thank you so much for your time and help i will donate some buck's to you as soon as i open my paypal account and set up everything in a e mail account for business.

About Me

Hoosier Newman is known as the Laptop Doctor in Charlotte. More of a hobby that got out of hand than a business. Since I am thoroughly familiar with computers it is a deviation from the ordinary. See my profile in my blog for additional notes ...